Seagate Personal Cloud (2-Bay) Review

Table of Contents

Introduction & Design

Cloud storage is in increasingly common use, with public programs like Dropbox and Google Drive dominating the field. The trouble with cloud-based services, though, is threefold: the relatively limited capacity, the ongoing subscription costs, and the need for lots of bandwidth to get masses of data up and down.

The entry-level cloud offerings will entice you with a few free gigabytes of capacity, but it doesn’t take much to burn through this. Dropbox and Google will charge you $10 per month for a terabyte in the cloud, while Google also offers a $2-per-month option for 100GB. Warning given: Once you start down the dark path of paying every month for storage, forever will it dominate your destiny. It will become a regular utility bill, like water or electricity.

If the prospect of gaining another monthly charge doesn’t appeal to you, then welcome to the same dilemma that enterprises face: Do you want to pay a little every month for public cloud services, or take a one-time hit to run your own private cloud infrastructure on-site? Fortunately, the consumer version of a private cloud—in the form of a network-attached storage (NAS) drive—is fairly painless and affordable. The key manufacturers of NAS drives—notably, the hard drive giants Seagate, WD, and Toshiba, as well as innovators such as Synology and QNAP—have been refining their NAS offerings for the past few years with, in some cases, significant advances in ease of use.

Seagate’s latest foray into “personal cloud” solutions, the inevitably named Personal Cloud and Personal Cloud 2-Bay, bring this experience directly into the home office or living room in unobtrusive-looking boxes. Single-drive Personal Cloud models come in capacities of 3TB ($169.99), 4TB ($219.99), and 5TB ($249.99, all of these prices direct from Seagate as of this writing).

The dual-drive Personal Cloud 2-Bay we're reviewing here, meanwhile, ships in 4TB ($299.99), 6TB ($379.99), and 8TB ($479.99) variants. We received the 8TB version for review. Note that Seagate, unlike some competing NAS makers such as QNAP and Synology, doesn't offer the Personal Cloud 2-Bay in a bare-chassis form. That's no surprise, though. Seagate, like its steady competitor WD, is first and foremost in the business of selling platter hard drives.

Before you get too excited about having 6TB or 8TB of storage, understand that the Personal Cloud 2-Bay defaults to a RAID 1 mirroring configuration, meaning that all of the data you stash on the first drive gets copied identically ("mirrored") onto the second drive. The second drive is thus invisible to the user, leaving you with only 4TB of actual, addressable storage, not the 8TB advertised on our review sample’s box. The upside of this arrangement is that if you ever suffer a drive failure, all of your data will be safe and sound on the other drive. The downside, of course, is that while you’re gaining protection, you’re losing half of the effective capacity you paid for. If this bothers you, the device setup allows you to switch from RAID 1 to RAID 0, which not only will give you the full capacity of both drives, but also should perform faster. Just be aware that RAID 0 is unprotected. If either of the drives fail, you lose everything.

The Personal Cloud 2-Bay is simple enough. It’s a flat black box measuring 2x9x9 inches. The device is squat, with plenty of ventilation through a bottom grille. The power, Ethernet, and USB 2.0 ports (and the reset button) in the rear sit framed on either side by a power button and a release-latch button that locks the case interior and access to the drives themselves...

A single USB 3.0 port, meanwhile, waits on one side panel...

As you can see, Seagate doesn’t bother with a lot of extraneous bells and whistles cluttering up the slim, stylish form of this drive.

Continuing the theme of simplicity, a single LED built into the top of the box, just above the Seagate logo on the front face, serves as the lone readout...

It flashes during startup and when initiating the software, and that's about it. If a serious problem does arise, though, this doesn’t provide much to go on at a glance.

Realize that the Personal Cloud, even in its Personal Cloud 2-Bay version, is meant to be a living-room-friendly, décor-neutral device. As the look suggests, this isn't a hard-core NAS along the lines of the multiple-bay, business-oriented devices from QNAP or Synology, or the "Pro" grade models from Seagate itself or WD. You don't have slide-in, slide-out removable drive trays accessible from the front panel of this NAS that allow for hot-swaps of a dead drive. Nor is there a visual readout that lets you diagnose configuration, networking, or drive-health issues direct from the front panel.

The Personal Cloud 2-Bay looks instead like a nondescript cable set-top box or DVR unit. You can pop open the 2-Bay's chassis and access the drives if you need to, but this isn't a quick-change kind of drive. It's meant to be a plain box that you rarely, if ever, root around inside.

It's also meant to be snap-simple to configure and maintain, and here Seagate, impressively, succeeds. The drive maker has done one of the best jobs we've seen to date in making this model configurable and remote-accessible without demanding particular expertise or networking bravado from you.